Sharing Life's Lessons on Living in this World and yet being Above it!

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Friday, June 12, 2015

There’s no point in carrying issues, injuries, insults in Life

No insult
or injury is worth carrying in Life, let alone to the grave.

While all of humanity understands this simple
truth and knows how vain it is to cling on to such sentiments, everyone
struggles with letting go of insults, barbs and forgettable memories. The
struggle is because of the ego within us speaking up, louder than our hearts: the
“How dare he?” scream drowns the “It’s OK!” whisper.

Joe Frazier (1944 ~ 2011), the boxing
heavyweight, was one who took his sporting rivalry with the great Muhammad Ali
too personally, and carried it literally to his grave. For years, Frazier had
voiced his bitterness over the way Ali had insulted him, over how Ali had
called him "ugly," "a gorilla," and an "Uncle
Tom." His anger was never in fuller view than when Ali, stricken with
Parkinson's disease, lit the Olympic flame at the 1996 Games in Atlanta, and
Frazier said he would have liked to have "pushed him in." To be sure,
Ali had said this of Frazier: “Joe
Frazier is so ugly that when he cries, the tears turn around and go down the
back of his head.” ESPN commentator and writer Mike Sielski opines, “The
two are forever linked, thanks to their three timeless bouts -- Frazier won
only the first, and the third was a near-death experience for both of them --
the contrasting styles with which they fought, and the vitriol they hurled at
each other for so long.” Yet their rivalry was both meaningless and childish
for all their greatness __ because in reality
they complimented each other. “Technically the loser of two of the three
fights, [Frazier] seems not to understand that they ennobled him as much as
they did Ali," wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Halberstam,
"that the only way we know of Ali's greatness is because of Frazier's
equivalent greatness, that in the end there was no real difference between the
two of them as fighters, and when sports fans and historians think back, they will
think of the fights as classics, with no identifiable winner or loser. These
are men who, like it or not, have become prisoners of each other and those
three nights.” They did come close more than a few times to make up and get
over their sentiments. Frazier and his nemesis have alternated between public
apologies and public insults. One exchange came in 2001, says ESPN, after Ali
told The New York Times he was sorry
for what he said about Frazier before their first fight. At first, Frazier
accepted the apology, but then … “He didn't apologize to me -- he apologized to
the paper,” Frazier said in an issue of TV
Guide. “I'm still waiting [for him] to say it to me.” Ali's response: “If
you see Frazier, you tell him he's still a gorilla.” Joe Frazier died in November
2011, beaten, a financially and emotionally broken man, by liver cancer. Ali
graciously attended his funeral, realizing, perhaps, when he said, “The world
has lost a great champion. I will always remember Joe with respect and
admiration,” that he had said too little, too late.

There’s a lot of Frazier and Ali in each of us.
We are prisoners of our experiences and emotions. We cling on to positions we
have taken, opinions we have formed and events we have been through. We hurt
within but are too proud to accept that we are hurting. Review your Life. What
are you hurting from, hurting with? Let go. Go say sorry to someone that you
had hurt in the past, today. Write a note to someone saying you forgave them.
If you don’t want to do either, just say it to yourself. And the next time you
meet that person, look her or him in the eye, smile and give that person a hug.
Life’s not a boxing ring. Remember: all the
greatness of our professional successes will be pale and insignificant in the
face of advancing age, failing health and the certain death that awaits us all.